2023 | 8 min read
The Haruki Murakami Library, known officially as the Waseda International House of Literature, is tucked away in a leafy corner of Tokyo’s Waseda University. This is where Murakami studied drama in the 1970s, and where more recently he donated his archives for posterity. He’s not dead yet, by the way. But when the cat does finally go, he almost certainly won’t be thinking, “But I haven’t even prepared.”
The library is housed in a renovated concrete building which has been wrapped in a flowing wooden skirt by architect Kengo Kuma, another fine cat. At its centre is a book-lined wooden staircase that cleaves the library in two. In Kuma’s own words, the enclosed staircase represents a tunnel that leads to another world, just like Murakami’s fiction.
The wood-loving maestro has nailed it. As you climb down this warm and inviting passage, this grooved tube lined with literary fiction, you are entering Murakami’s world. You can almost picture the author at the bottom of the stairs, speaking in that uncool voice we all use when showing guests around our new place. “And down here,” he beckons you impatiently, “is where we’ve had the new cervix installed.”
The Murakami groove tube is bordered on either side by several floors of minimalist shelf-lined rooms. These can be said to form the library’s buttocks and thighs. They contain not only every edition of Murakami ever published, but also other books and records that correspond to the author’s particular tastes. And over the years, Murakami’s tastes have come occupy a similar standing to his own writing.
The Murakami Library is not just a place of study but a temple erected to good taste. Now, at last, the Friends of Murakami, those good old Twentieth Century boys, can all jive together in one happy canon. There’s old Ray Carver, not looking so handsome now the worms have got to him, pouring himself a double malt. Ray, you know you shouldn’t. Scottie Fitzgerald is in the downstairs cafe extemporising a few notes, with Thelonious Monk at the keys, Paul McCartney on standing bass, and Natsume Soseki on vibes.
A real treat for those hoping to penetrate the author’s enigma is the full-size replica of Murakami’s study, where each morning at some ungodly hour the cat himself sits down in front of a Mac screen, shakes his paws, and blows out his daily word-quota in an unbroken jazzy stream. Here is an exact replica of the sofa cushion that meets his sphinx-like gaze as he conjures out of thin air some hapless schmuck or troubled dame.
After finishing his 1600 words, Murakami hits save and heads out for his morning run. He has been, for some years now, a kind of magic-realist productivity guru. The library might be his next step to becoming a total lifestyle brand. That distinctive Murakami brand stands for, among other things, quality wooden furniture, classic Verve album covers, pour-over coffee, and disappearing cat’s tails. It stands for having a public grumble about the way the world is going, while taking private refuge in a world of good taste.
Becoming a total lifestyle brand means giving up certain cherished rights, such as the right to be a complete enigma. We’re beginning to learn more about Murakami, especially now the cat has dropped his most personal work yet, Novelist as a Vocation, a collection of essays on his life in writing. Here, finally, are his pet peeves and daily routines. Laid bare are his writing methods, almost down to the approximate number of times each hour he shifts his weight from his left buttock to his right.
It’s no surprise that Murakami himself turns out to be his most Murakami-like character yet. He’s quizzical and a little put-out. He doesn’t go to parties. People think they know him, but nope, that’s not him. He radiates a sense of injustice, of being somehow wronged, but still keeps it light and sparse in the groove. Inevitably, the prose is as easy to slip into as a well-worn New Balance sneaker or Old Navy jersey. And no matter what Murakami writes, it so often dissolves just as easily after reading.
Much of Novelist as a Vocation charts Murakami’s uneasy relationship with the literary establishment in Japan. He emerges as a magnificently prickly character in his own memoir. Did it bother him not winning the Akutagawa Prize in 1979? Like water off a duck’s back, can hardly remember the details, he tell us forty years later in a long essay criticising literary prizes.
As well as this prickly Murakami, we also get the perverse. The cat loves to confound. “I’ve never been on TV or radio, even once,” he preens at one point, swiftly followed by the editor’s note: “After the original publication of this book, Haruki Murakami began hosting his own radio program, Murakami Radio, in Japan.”
The surest way to get Murakami to do anything is to tell him that he once said he wouldn’t. If I was Haruki Murakami’s wife, I would be all for exploiting this trait. Bringing him a fresh pot of coffee and his cheque from the New Yorker in that combined role of secretary and housemaid that I shamefully imagine to be the life of a literary spouse, I would gently press him:
“Haru-chan, it’s May 12th. I don’t remember how many years ago it was exactly, but wasn’t it around this time of year when that awful literary magazine quoted you as saying that you would never, ever put down a toilet seat?”
“Huh,” the great novelist would say. “So that’s the kind of guy they think I am. They’re trying to make me out to be some kind of chauvinist. Well, I’ll show them.”
Back at the Murakami Library, there’s an exhibition of contemporary Japanese literature in translation. Murakami’s works have been translated into more than 50 languages and are displayed here alongside other Japanese authors who have been pushed and prodded onto the global stage. While there are subtle differences in how Japanese literature is packaged for different markets, you start to get a picture of what the world wants from Japanese literature and how that’s changed in recent decades.
What we talk about when we talk about contemporary Japanese literature, of course, is everything after Murakami. Up until the 1980s, Japanese literature was an aesthetic pleasure to be smoked in the opium dens of academia by qualified practitioners. The power trio of Tanizaki, Kawabata and Mishima played a heady brew of sex, love and death (usually, but not always, in that order) with zero relevance to the wider world, and that’s the way their aficionados liked it.
In the late 1980s, however, a new pop culture began emerging from Japan. If an earthquake in Japan’s image rippled across the world during this time, Murakami was the fault. And since Alfred Knopf had this cat all tied up, other publishers had to scramble for talent. This exhibition about contemporary Japanese literature in translation also ends up being about the search for the next Murakami.
For a while, the next Murakami was another Murakami, Ryu. But Ryu Murakami’s books were druggy and contained disturbing scenes; unlike Haruki Murakami’s, which were kooky and contained pasta recipes you could use. So the search for the next Murakami was resumed and broadened out to include authors whose names were not Murakami. Several other candidates were tried and quietly dropped, until some cat in publishing stumbled in high off an Edward de Bono lateral thinking course, drained an entire bottle of Pinot Grigio in front of startled colleagues and screamed, quote, “What if the next Murakami was a WOO-MAN?”
Which when you think about it makes total sense as the Murakami oeuvre, despite its hardboiled pretensions and the flexing of male paraphernalia like baseball and beer, describes something of a female condition. His protagonists are almost always men, but they’re men who kick their heels in domestic space, men who experience a certain lack of agency in the world. In Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami alludes to this gender-bending with some trademark modesty: “Once when I was talking with a young woman reader, she asked me, ‘Mr Murakami, how is it that though you’re a man in your sixties, you understand young women’s feelings so well?’”
It’s no coincidence that Murakami’s true heirs turned out to be, get this, a bunch of chicks, and boy did these chicks know how to kook. They might view the world differently, but their tubes all led to that same Murakami-shaped space: the Everyday Fantastic. Which describes ultimately what the world wants most from Japanese literature: to witness strange things happen to ordinary people.
Alfred Birnbaum, who was Murakami’s first English translator, has said that this Everyday Fantastic is what first drew him to Murakami’s fiction: “Unlike almost all Japanese writing that is either extremely realistic or extremely fantastic with no middle ground, it cut a fine balance between everyday tedium and fantasy; it kept the surrealism well within the realm of possibility, if not the plausible.”
Old Birnbaum was really onto something there, because when Murakami first arrived in translation he sounded perfectly in tune with the times, the global age of the self, but played fantastical notes that seemed plausible because they happened in Japan. Meanwhile, the so-called real Japanese literature that Murakami’s critics love to acclaim relies on culturally significant details that don’t easily translate. Murakami’s innovation, which he stumbled on accidentally by writing in English and back-translating into Japanese, was to solo hard on interiority and leave out the cultural nuance.
It’s become the fashion to either love or hate Murakami. He’s either the cat’s meow or something unpleasant on your doorstep. It’s no surprise that when he ventures to write outside his usual Everyday-Joe persona, as in the astonishingly boring 1Q84, his work gets widely panned. But debating whether he represents real Japanese literature is to miss the point. Murakami is one of the first truly global authors. His books are part of the global news cycle and it no longer even seems to matter if they’re read.
His fans belong to a global community of dreamy, sensitive types who say things like “Well, isn’t life a bit strange?” before pairing off to have Murakami-babies. The beauty of this community is that anyone can join. Most of the pilgrims and scholars on the stairs of the Murakami Library are foreigners. “We’ll take over from here, thanks,” they might as well be saying, “he belongs to us now.”
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